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A Surprise Inside the Wood Stove

One day I arrived home from work to a surprise inside the wood cook stove. My wife was cooking dinner on our propane stove, and left a note for me on the wood cook stove. It was a late fall day, and the chill in the air beckoned for a fire in the wood cook stove each evening, but first a look inside.

Inside the stove, a small noise could be heard as something moved slightly about in the firebox. Not knowing what it could be and hoping it wasn’t a maimed mouse brought in stealthily by the cats, I grabbed a flashlight and approached the situation from a bird’s eye view through the firebox cook lid opening. I peered down into the darkness hoping the flashlight expose what was inside. The rest can be seen in the video as I change my work clothes into an old sweatshirt and use an old pillow case for the task of removing our stole away bird.

As can be seen, the removal of the bird was incredibly easy, but making the video was not. I recently applied for a grant to improve my journalism class at school. I was blessed to receive three Mac computers with the highly coveted Final Cut Pro program. What I have discovered in the process is the painful superiority complex Macintosh has created in the PC world to over complicate simple computer use functions. Where I can find simple help tutorials with Blender, Movie, Maker and Even Adobe Premier, however, not with Final Cut Pro. A user must pay for a class to get what a simple user manual should provide. I have never been a Mac user and I understand why. Last night I spent 45 minutes trying to get the Mac to recognize my flash drive and it still doesn’t. I have to go online today and research more on how to get a normal plug and play device to play nice with Mac. Video editing has been an adventure, and I am unsure if it is skill or pure stubbornness in forcing my will upon the program. I hope to get better with practice, but it’s definitely a challenge to me.

“Bird.” The World Book Encyclopedia. Field Enterprises Inc, 1952. I find many uses for my mom’s World Book Encyclopedia Books to this day.

After much frustration with technology these past few months, I reverted back to a classic way to identify the bird who had inadvertently trapped itself in our wood cook stove. Instead of turning to the vast amounts of overwhelming information on the World Wide Web, I turned to my mother’s encyclopedias she gifted to me. My mom where given these encyclopedias by her parents when she was a child. I have always loved my mom’s encyclopedia collection. When I was younger, I would read them for fun, and as I got into high school, the Internet was still not invented yet, so I used them for reports I had to do for class. Under the section devoted to birds, I found a variety of pictures and matched the bird’s features that impressed upon me, the narrow curved beak, the oval marks on the bird’s cheeks, the spots on the bird’s chest, the gray color of feathers. Soon it became apparent that it was Flicker. Now taking that new substantiated info, I was able to do a concise search online which gave me the characteristics of the bird, and how it ended up in our chimney. The Northwest Flicker, one of over a hundred names, likes to nest in hollow trees and also use their beak to drum territorial signals to others of its kind on metal objects. The chimney served both purposes, it made a load sound in which to drum its beak upon to broadcast the bird’s message. And, once the bird found its way into the chimney cap, it felt like a nice hollow tree to explore and make a home, until it ended up in the firebox.

Sixty-six years later and still useful. I find that many things our society has discarded as obsolete are still very useful and relevant to this day.

4 thoughts on “A Surprise Inside the Wood Stove”

I had one, but I cut small squares out of it due to soot and creosote blocking the chimney one very cold winter. The heat of the chimney created enough condensation on the screen to block the smoke leaving, and it backed up into the house. One bird over 8 years versus climbing a metal roof with a 6:12 pitch in the middle of winter. I’ll take the bird.

Loved it. 🙂 🙂
You’re the Man, once again Mark. Just goes to show what a little knowledge and a Pillow Case can accomplish 🙂
I hope You and your sweet family have a Very Merry Christmas, and a Happy, Healthy New Year.

PS…… Maybe a “Flicker in a wood stove” could be added to the “Twelve Day’s Before Christmas” now. 🙂
Big Hug’s,
Aunt Patty-Dawn ❤